


there's talk going 'round this town

by shinealightonme



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe - Hollywood, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Crack, M/M, games of emotional chicken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 10:03:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15947099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: Ronan married Adam Parrish in the summer of 2015, but it didn't mean anything. They're actors. It wasn't real.





	there's talk going 'round this town

**Author's Note:**

> You know that feeling when you just want to get some work done on one of your works in progress, just _one_ of them, _any_ of them, you have _so many works in progress_ , and then you read a news story about [Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves realizing they might be married](https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/20/entertainment/winona-ryder-keanu-reeves-married/index.html) and suddenly that's the only thing your dumb brain wants to write about?
> 
> Yeah. This is that.

"I'm not asking you not to do anything stupid," Declan says. "You were a child actor, that ship has sailed -- "

"Right, because your talentless ass grew up so well-adjusted."

Declan grabs the script out of Ronan's hands and throws it across the room. No big loss. It was something his agent had literally begged him to read, _just the first ten pages, you'll love it, I promise,_ and five pages in the only conclusion that Ronan had come to was that it was time to switch agents again.

"I only _ask,_ " Declan continues, "that you _tell_ me about the stupid shit you do, before I see it on TMZ."

Ronan thinks. "I crashed a car out in the Hills last week."

"Who do you think the insurance company called?"

"I called Tarantino a dickhole at a party."

"He is a dickhole."

"I bought some weed off of a grip the other day."

"Why are you buying weed off of random idiots? This isn't the 90's, go to a dispensary like an adult."

"Because the grip was the director's nephew and I wanted to piss him off."

Declan breathes in. Ronan can tell he's counting, _one, two, three._

"Ronan," after he gets to ten, "I put up with enough of your attempts to irritate me, I don't care about the petty bullshit you do to everyone else." Ronan crosses his arms; _so why are you here?_ "I care about _this,_ " and he holds his phone out.

Ronan takes it. Might as well get a laugh out of whatever unimportant or untrue thing they're telling people about him now.

 _Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish_  
_SECRET WEDDING?_

"What, you fell for this?" Ronan snorts. "Tabloids always say I'm dating someone I'm not."

"They have a copy of your marriage license."

A tripwire goes off in Ronan's brain, _trouble, trouble, trouble,_ but there's no need to let Declan know that.

"So they know how to use Photoshop," Ronan says, but the little alarm is getting louder and louder.

"Do you think I'm an idiot? It's a matter of public record. I don't expect you to bother telling _me_ when you get married," Declan says, bitter. He's doing a bang up job of not caring, all right. "But I'd think you'd have told Matthew, at least."

Oh, shit, Matthew. Had he seen this? He must have. Declan would have shown it to him, and demanded an explanation, and Matthew would have looked at him all confused and heartbroken. Ronan's probably getting a phone call in a minute, _congrats,_ not even asking for an explanation, because Matthew wants to be happy for him.

Ronan would love to give Matthew an explanation, but he has no idea what he'd say.

"I gotta go," he says, and shoves his way past Declan, heads for the front door at a pace just short of a sprint.

-

_Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish tied the knot in 2015...TMZ has learned._

_The two were filming Devotion together (you remember it as that movie you didn't see that made your mother cry) and their onscreen chemistry translated into an off-screen relationship in that whirlwind way that only Hollywood romance can..._

-

Ronan has spent all of one day on set with Adam Parrish. Devotion focused on two other couples, one falling in love and one falling out of love, with his and Parrish's wedding as a backdrop. The wedding ceremony was the only scene they'd been in together, but it had taken all day to shoot, because Cheng had insisted on filming the _entire ceremony_ in one long master take. He'd even had them sign a marriage license, using their own legal names, because he said it would make their performance more honest.

And yet Declan wonders why Ronan doesn't do more "serious" movies. Jesus Christ.

He thinks hard about how much he hated working with Cheng while he drives to his office, because the alternative is thinking about that marriage license.

His assistant looks up when he enters, but only for a second, and then she turns back to her video game.

"Where's Henry Cheng right now?" he asks.

"How should I know?" Opal's avatar shoots off a stream of bullets. An alien expires in a shower of green blood.

"You're my assistant. You talk to other people's assistants. They know things."

"Other people's assistants suck," Opal says, and Ronan has to agree. Certainly no one else's assistant is a perpetually scowling nineteen-year-old that responded to an anonymous one-sentence craigslist ad with an email "u sound like a serial killer,, im in" and didn't give a shit when their employer turned out to be famous. Other people's assistants make their lives easier, or at least not actively harder. Then again, other people's offices aren't in the attics above greasy pizza joints.

Ronan slaps a hand down on Opal's keyboard, hitting buttons at random. Her character explodes.

"I need to talk to Henry Cheng. Now."

Opal switches over to a browser and sends off a dozen chat messages in the time it would take Ronan to remember his email password. He appreciates that she doesn't suggest he just make a phone call to any of the much better connected people that they know; she gets him too well for that.

She'll have her revenge on him later for making her do work at her job, but that's fair. He gets her too well to think otherwise

"He's filming today. The Bradbury building, the shoot's going to go all night." She looks at him sarcastically, cooperation burned clear through. "Do you need me to send the directions to your phone?"

"No," and as he's leaving he hears Opal on the phone, "hi, Tony, I'm going to need thirteen pizzas? Yeah, Mr. Lynch's credit card," but he wouldn't expect any less.

-

It's easy to find Cheng once he's on the set. He just looks for the chaos and dives straight in.

Cheng's in the middle of a shot, and _fuck,_ Ronan almost wishes that he read the trades, until he remembers how much he hates even thinking the phrase _the trades_. But if he ever glanced at a copy of Variety he might have known that Cheng's current project starred _Adam Fucking Parrish_.

Ronan's husband. Maybe. Fuck.

It makes a terrible kind of sense. Cheng does the kind of unwatchable movies that people throw awards at, and even without reading the trades Ronan knows that Parrish is desperate for an Oscar. Desperate enough to play gay, at least.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out to see that Matthew is calling him.

He shoves the phone back in his pocket and yells "Cut!"

The set around him loses coherency. The crew scrambles to figure out who screwed up. _Professional, unbreakable_ Adam Parrish stays in character, but the actress opposite him turns, confused, so there's the shot blown.

A tiny woman charges up at Ronan. He knows immediately who she must be. Only ADs can project that kind of murder from their eyes.

Cheng intervenes before his assistant director can maul Ronan to death for fucking with her schedule. "Lynch, I understand that some actors get the itch to direct, but you will find it a much more rewarding experience to have your own project, on your own set, instead of invading mine."

"I need to talk to you. Now." He looks over at Parrish, still halfway up a flight of stairs; he hadn't budged from his mark. "You too."

That gets him a whole blink and a slight eyebrow furrow, which is about the most expression that he's ever gotten from Parrish. He'd forgotten that, the way the guy refused to react to anything off camera, like he was worried he was going to _use up_ his emotions. Christ, this isn't going to turn out to be some mistake; that would be too convenient.

Ronan scans the crew around him for someone who looks like a fan -- there, PA, clutching a clipboard to her chest. He doesn't get _why_ straight women like him so much, but he's not above using it to his advantage. "Green room?"

She nods repeatedly and leads him to a secluded room, strewn about with abandoned instruments of makeup torture. Cheng follows them; his nose for drama overrules his need to call the shots on his set. Parrish either isn't coming or is walking too quietly, and Ronan isn't going to look desperate by checking, except now it's some fucking Eurydice bullshit that makes him want to hit something.

The PA leaves, flustered, and it's the three of them: Ronan, Cheng, and Parrish. Of course he followed his director. He's professional, he's a suck up, he's dead inside and this is the closest he can get to feeling anything, who cares.

"Now, Lynch, as much as I would miss myself if I were you -- "

Ronan says, "the news just broke that Parrish and I are married."

Even Parrish's creepy blank face can't fail to respond to _that_. "What?"

"There's a photo of a marriage license we signed." He glares at Cheng. "It looks an awful lot like the one that _you_ made us sign on the Devotion set."

"Oh," Cheng says, with more dread than surprise. "Dear."

"What _oh, dear?_ There is no _oh, dear_." It turns out Parrish has a mode other than _boring_ and _acting_ : complete indignation. "That doesn't explain anything. It was a prop, it's not like it was recorded with the county."

"Lynch," Cheng says, "do you recall the night during filming that we went out drinking?"

The alarms in his head ring again, louder than ever. "The day the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage."

"They legalized it," Parrish snaps, "they didn't make it _mandatory._ "

Ronan had gotten _very_ drunk that night, along with Cheng and a handful of queer crew members and every last person in gay Hollywood that they'd run into while barhopping. But he doesn't ever black out for good, just browns out, sometimes, until something makes him remember.

Something like Cheng's face and a goddamn marriage certificate.

It had been late, four in the morning late; the bar was technically closed but everyone was refusing to leave, and Ronan had told Cheng how he wanted to get married to somebody, anybody, to rub it in all those panicky straight faces. And then Cheng pointed out that he _had_ married someone, that very week --

"You didn't _file_ that license," Ronan says.

"Of course not!" Cheng insists. "I was incapacitated with drink the same as you were. But I find it possible that I may have asked my assistant to do so. And when I say jump my assistant does not ask how high, he merely leaps as high into the air as he is able."

Parrish's voice is flat in a way that from anyone else would spell _rage_ but from him probably just means _robot_. "You filed our _fake marriage license_."

Cheng blurts out "it was Lynch's idea!" because you don't get to be a director without abandoning all human decency.

Parrish glares at Ronan. It pricks at him: because they could be in this together and Parrish is choosing to be a jerk instead; because who the hell does Parrish think he is to judge Ronan when he wasn't even there; because Ronan screwed up and Parrish is holding him accountable and he hates that.

"I get that _you_ don't care about marriage equality," Ronan drawls, "but it was a big deal for some of us."

"If you two were so hellbent on getting married you could have married each other."

"What, Lynch?" Cheng asks, inappropriately amused, at the same time that Ronan growls " _no_."

Parrish pinches the bridge of his nose, which is a gesture Ronan's only ever seen on camera. No one _does_ that, not really. Ronan is more convinced than ever that Parrish doesn't have emotions, only performances. "It's done. We'll just have to fix it," and he looks back at Cheng, cutting Ronan out of the conversation, dismissing him. "Can we get back to set now? I'd like to keep on schedule so that I have time later to deal with this mess."

It doesn't occur to Ronan until he's back at the office, wondering who the hell puts pineapple and garlic on the same pizza, that he shouldn't have left the set. He should have stuck around and screwed up their shoot even more.

"Sometimes," he tells Opal, "when you act out of anger, you fuck up your revenge."

"Are you trying to mentor me?" Her nose wrinkles. "Ew."

-

He's annoyed all over again when he gets served with the divorce petition two days later -- through his agent, like Parrish couldn't bother to get his address from Cheng or any of the dozens of one-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon that they have in common. Like this is a clinical business transaction, as emotionless as Parrish once the cameras are off.

Ronan stews while Opal hacks into Declan's email to look up the name of the attorney that had handled his prenup, and by the time she finds it, he has an idea.

-

"You're _contesting_ the divorce?"

That's not what people typically say when they see Ronan's office for the first time. Usually it's _what a dump_ or _why_ or _did you blow all your money on drugs_ or, once, _you gonna finish that meatball sub?_

But Parrish is Ronan's _husband_. Of course he's special.

"I want to work on our relationship," Ronan says.

"We have no relationship. We don't even know each other."

 _Exasperated_ is a surprisingly good look for Parrish. It would be rude of Ronan not to encourage that.

"I care about the sanctity of marriage."

"You drunk married me when I wasn't there," Parrish snapped. "Sanctity was never a part of this."

Ronan pulls a sad face, the look he'd pull in a movie after his character's car and/or dog and/or love interest exploded. "Is this because of our lack of sexual intimacy? Because they have therapists for that -- "

Parrish whirls around and storms out.

Opal takes one earbud out of her ear. "Hey, Ronan, your husband is here to see you."

-

"Adam's attorney sent us interrogatories."

The divorce lawyer is disappointingly easy to fluster. The guy's talked _money_ with _Declan_ ; a client showing up with a little blood on his clothes shouldn't be scary after that.

It's not like it's real blood, mostly.

"It's unusual to serve discovery this early in a dissolution," the attorney rambles, as Ronan starts flipping through Parrish's hefty document. "And the scope of what he's asking for is completely unfounded."

Ronan's eye catches on a paragraph halfway through the stack: _produce copies of all communications, including but not limited to e-mails, text messages, and letters, between yourself and Declan Lynch from June 2015 through the date of your response_ \-- he snorts, impressed. Parrish had done his homework on how to get under Ronan's skin.

"He has no grounds to request these for a simple divorce," the lawyer is saying. "I'm amazed his attorney would send this."

Ronan isn't. He can picture it perfectly, Parrish dictating an exhaustive list of things to ask Ronan for, and going stone-faced and robot-repeating himself when his attorney tried to explain that he wasn't allowed to do that.

"We'll object, of course -- " 

"No," Ronan says. "This is good," and he leaves without explaining what he meant.

When he gets back to the office Opal is eating a slice of pepperoni with mustard smeared over it and painting a ten-foot-tall canvas in nothing but shades of red.

"How fast can you send junk emails to Declan?" he asks her.

"He's had your address blocked for months."

Ronan considers this. "So there'd be two emails for every one that we sent him. Because we'd get a bounce back."

"Yeah."

"Do you think you could send him a hundred emails by next week?"

Opal looks at him in utter disgust. "I can write a program to send him a random image every ten seconds."

Ronan grins.

-

"My attorney took one look at all the crap you sent and quit."

"I was giving you what you asked for." Ronan's glad that he ran into Parrish outside the pizza shop. The office has too much old pizza in it for him to convincingly play _responsible and concerned husband_. "I want to provide for you."

Parrish isn't buying that line, even in the absence of smellable proof that Ronan is not a competent adult. "Fine, you win. You're the most annoying. Can we get divorced now?"

"Sure," Ronan says, reasonable and calm. "Sign the agreement I sent you."

Parrish's eyebrows shoot up. "The one where you get maintenance? No."

"I'll need help getting back on my feet after this heartbreak."

"You were one of the Forbes' highest paid actors last year, I'm not paying you alimony."

"You'd make more money if you spent less time chasing Oscars."

Parrish rolls his eyes. "So I should just star in mindless action movies where I punch people, is that it?"

Ronan knows what people think of his career choices. He's been in a whole _series_ of movies about _Jackson Fox, international car thief,_ and in the later ones he's somehow also a spy, for fuck's sake. If it weren't for his own powers of discernment, if it weren't for glimpses of film reviews he couldn't avoid, if it weren't for agents sending him every script with a car chase and never mind that most of them didn't have characters worth the name, he'd still have Declan telling him that he could do so much better if he _chose_ to.

He's gotten pretty used to shrugging it off, but now here's Parrish, who was _in_ that fucking art film with him and still managed to come away with the idea that Ronan's just an idiot with muscles.

"Maybe you should," Ronan says. "At least then you wouldn't have to play gay anymore, since you clearly hate that."

"Do you think I'm mad because you're a _guy?_ I'm mad because you filed a legal document in my name without my knowledge or consent."

Ronan _tch_ s, crosses his arms in front of his chest.

Parrish's eyes dart side to side, quick. The kind of move you do when you're used to checking if anyone is watching you. He steps in and lowers his voice. "You know what I did the night the same sex marriage was legalized, while you were out getting wasted and committing fraud? I got into an argument with the guy I was seeing, because he wanted to get married and I didn't think we were ready. Because I take marriage seriously and I didn't want to rush into it. Except apparently I could have saved myself the trouble of going through an ugly break up since you'd already decided to rush me into it _anyway_."

Ronan refuses to get distracted; that's too obviously what Parrish was counting on. "It's not my fault you got cold feet and dumped your boyfriend, or that you're stuck in the closet -- "

"I like my privacy," Parrish says, and adds, with an odd note of bitterness, "I thought you could relate."

The closet had never been an option for Ronan. A picture of his first kiss sold to the tabloids for ten thousand dollars.

"Would you look at that," Ronan says, flippant. "We have more in common than we realized."

Parrish watches him, waiting for something more. When Ronan doesn't give it to him, he draws himself up, face cold and shuttered again.

"You want to be married? _Fine_."

-

Ronan is tempted to not pick up when Declan calls.

He's always tempted to not pick up his phone, and doubly so when it's Declan, but the last time he ignored a call Declan had shown up at his office in person and sent a health inspector to the pizza joint the next day, out of what he claimed was genuine concern for public health, but which was obviously spite.

"What?"

At least Declan gets right to the point. "When I said I didn't want to hear about your life from TMZ, I didn't mean I wanted to read about it in Us Weekly."

"Son of a bitch." Ronan hangs up. Let Declan figure out that for once he meant someone else. Or not. That's less important than -- the horror, the horror -- locating a copy of Us Weekly.

Ronan knows that every idiot with a camera phone is waiting for him to hit rock bottom. He's had a few close calls, with boys or booze or cars, that could have screwed up his life for good, that landed him close enough to rock bottom that he's always known what it would look like, when he got there for real.

Or so he thought. It turns out that rock bottom looks like buying a copy of Us Weekly with himself and his accidental husband on the cover while the teenage girl on register asks if he'll sign her copy.

He retreats to the pizza shop to read the damn thing; he's not going to give anyone a chance to snap a photo of _that._

He reads the whole article, swears, and throws the magazine across the room.

Opal picks it up off the ground and tears out an ad. She holds it up to the painting she's been working on, red paint caked on red paint like blood on a brick, and then she stabs a paintbrush through the magazine page and the canvas.

"What do you think?" she asks.

"It lazy pretentious crap and I hate it," Ronan says.

Opal nods, like that was constructive criticism.

Ronan grabs the magazine and flips back through it.

Parrish did a good job with the interview. He somehow painted them as a cute, functional couple without telling a single direct lie.

Wasn't that fast to get married? _I'm not one for spur of the moment decisions, but Ronan isn't one for 'normal'._

How did it feel, to marry someone you hardly knew? _There's a definite element of surprise. I still learn something new about Ronan every day_.

Whose idea was it to keep the relationship a secret? _We're both happier keeping our personal life quiet._

And Ronan has a long history of being in the public eye: _I think the kind of exposure he had, from such a young age, had an effect on him. But it's reductive to say that that's the only reason Ronan is the way he is. Ronan has to disengage from people because when he does engage he does it completely. There's no such thing as a casual interaction with Ronan Lynch,_ and doesn't Parrish make that sound deceptively like a compliment, if you don't know better. If you don't know it's code for _you would not believe what an asshole this guy can be when he puts his mind to it._

He talks more generally about being bi, about his reasons for not talking about it before now. He also manages to get in a plug for the movie he's in that comes out next month, because ugh, Hollywood.

Ronan throws the magazine away again.

"Call Henry Cheng," he tells Opal.

"I don't like phone calls. Make your agent do it."

"What the hell am I paying you for?"

"To feed your pet snake," Opal answers, promptly.

Ronan hesitates. He could let it go. Nothing good is going to come from asking.

"I don't have a pet snake."

Opal just looks at him.

Ronan grinds his teeth and goes to call Cheng himself, and to tell his agent to figure out if there's a snake secretly living in his house.

-

Cheng doesn't admit that the marriage is his fault or that he is indebted to Ronan in any way, but he agrees to help.

"For my own entertainment, you understand."

"I don't care why, I just need you to do it." Ronan tosses his champagne back like a shot. Fuck, he hates industry parties; the presence of people on all sides, the inane chatter about box office and botox, the chance that someone could snap a photograph at any moment for the world to misconstrue. There'll be conspiracy theories tomorrow that he and Cheng are fucking since they were standing within a ten feet of each other --

\-- except no, because everyone's already buying into the conspiracy theory that Ronan's fucking his husband.

"I don't see him. Are you sure he's coming to this thing? He's not a mingling and cocktails kind of guy."

"Of course he is not," Cheng says, "but he weathers them as does a martyr going to the pyre."

"Waste of time."

"For you, perhaps. For those of us who wish to befriend the monolith of old white men who make up the Academy, a tragic necessity."

"Why do you care what a bunch of old white men think about you?"

"I care," Cheng says, significantly, " _because_ they are a bunch of old white men."

Ronan snorts. "And you're going to defeat racism from the inside, is that it?"

"It is easier to do from the inside than the outside."

He grabs another flute of champagne off of a passing waiter's tray. He could ask if they have anything stronger, except as fast as he's drinking that would end in more tabloid covers. "They're just movies. What the hell does it matter who gets awards?"

"You say that," Cheng says, "and yet, you worked with me on Devotion. In fact, you have appeared in several movies that did not make money or develop you fanbase or allow you to drive fast imported cars. Projects that I am certain your agents advised you against, because there was nothing for you to gain from them -- or nothing except the chance to play a character on screen whose sexuality matched your own."

"So I like playing gay more than playing straight. Hasn't anyone told you I'm a shitty actor?"

"I do not work with bad actors, no matter how handsome they are," and Cheng doesn't flinch at Ronan's glare. "Nor do I put any stock in your claims that you don't believe representation in film matters."

Ronan turns away with an annoyed little _tch_. His eyes fall on Parrish, finally, across the room, talking to a woman who's gazing up at him like he's got _her_ vote.

He sticks his empty glass in Cheng's hand and walks off without a goodbye. _Representation_ \-- good fucking luck, Cheng.

He slides up beside Parrish without warning. Parrish, damn him, isn't rattled at all. He runs a hand behind Ronan's back and rests it there, low and casual, in that way people do when they're familiar enough with each other's bodies that every touch is a source of comfort.

"Ronan, there you are," like he's been waiting for him, like Ronan had _wandered off_ instead of been looking for him since he got here. "Ronan is looking for a new agent," he tells the woman that he's talking to, and her eyes take on that predatory gleam that comes from calculating ten percent of Ronan Lynch's gross income.

Ronan doesn't trust that gleam. He pins a stare on her. "What do you know about snakes?"

She doesn't bat an eyelash, which is good, because hers are a good two inches long. "You're not actually supposed to suck the poison out of a snake bite. Not that screenwriters ever listen to me when when I tell them that."

Ronan thinks -- Opal wouldn't have unleashed a _poisonous_ snake in his house, would she?

No.

Would she?

He lets the agent give him her card, and Parrish pulls off one of those conversational goodbyes that doesn't feel like a blow-off even though it is.

"Cheng said you went to these things to suck up to Academy members," Ronan says. "Not chat up low level agents."

"You know those guys at parties who only talk to women they want to fuck?"

Ronan forces eye contract so he can say "No," pointedly.

Parrish sighs. "You know the concept of extrapolation and metaphor?"

"I starred in a Disney franchise instead of going to school."

"He says, as though Disney didn't hire him a tutor," and Ronan scowls, because who does Parrish think he is, not calling Ronan an uneducated barbarian. "I can't only talk to people that are useful to me, that's desperate and sleazy. People notice."

"So to prove that you're not desperate and sleazy, you're flirting with women instead of old guys."

"And isn't it great I have a husband who cares about my image enough to hang on my arm, so no one can get the wrong idea."

They pass into orbit of someone who shakes Parrish's hand and pushes a drink on him. Ronan hears the words "in development" and zones out until Parrish steers them away again.

"Here," he says, low, "make yourself useful."

"I thought I was protecting you from hot chicks. What more do you want from me?"

"Drink my champagne."

Ronan takes the glass from him, but says, "I think you're taking advantage of me."

"That's what you think of me, after I said all those nice things about you to Us Weekly?"

"That's what I think of you _because_ of all the shit you said to Us Weekly."

Parrish smirks. "Then you'd be right."

"More being desperate and sleazy without looking like it." He tosses back Parrish's champagne. "You wouldn't come out for the guy you were dating but you came out to spite me?"

"I came out to beat you," Parrish says. "Ready to get divorced?"

It's tempting. It would get Declan off his back and put an end to the technically true lies everyone is telling about him.

But there's no way he's going to give up when Parrish looks so smug and assured and utterly un-robotic.

"What, when we're finally opening up to each other?"

Someone takes a picture of them, capturing the exact moment that this turns from a drunken accident to a war.

-

"Do we have a website?"

"Tony runs the Yelp page," Opal says.

"Not the pizza shop. Me."

Opal spins around in her chair. It's not a swivel chair; she just spins until her legs are hitting the back of the chair, and then rotates her torso further still, too far, like some creepy owl person, until she's facing Ronan. "Why would you have a webpage?"

"People do," Ronan says, defensive. "They -- tweet and things."

Opal's voice is filled with disgust. "You want a social media presence."

"No. I'm asking if we have one."

"You have a Facebook fan page you never use."

"Then why do I have it?"

"Because if you didn't have one at all someone would make one _for_ you. This way I'm in control."

"Can you put this picture on it?" Ronan shows her the photo of him and Parrish at the party the night before.

"Hm." Without warning, Opal swings back around, as violently as before, to face her computer.

She hits some buttons. Ronan stoically refuses to look at the screen. When she's done there's a banner at the top of the Facebook page, him and Parrish with a bunch of hearts and sparkles and filtered through a soft lens, like someone let a fourth grader's Valentine DP a rom-com.

"Unless you think that's _too much._ " The answer to that would clearly be to throw more hearts at it.

"Perfect," Ronan says, and sends a link to the page to Parrish's cell -- which he'd had to learn from Cheng -- along with a kissy face emoji. Which is also learned how to do from Cheng. Hollywood is every bit the amoral cesspit that people say it is.

-

Parrish sends him a text the next day: _Do you have lunch plans?_

Ronan is supposed to record ADR in an hour. He hates ADR. Talking into a fucking microphone with clunky dialogue to fill plot holes the writers didn't bother to catch until after filming? Pass.

_you aren't busy?_

_Too busy for you? Never_

They don't make plans. Parrish just shows up at Ronan's place with a pizza box from downstairs.

Ronan has eaten Tony's pizza for his last eight meals. "You shouldn't have."

From the smirk on his face, Parrish knows exactly how Ronan feels at the thought of eating pizza right now. "It was no trouble," he says, fucking _saintly_. "I want to support your neighbors."

"I would have thought this was too low-rent for you."

"Not at all." Ronan lifts up the lid of the box, wondering what hell Parrish has unleashed -- it can't be worse than pineapple and garlic -- and he adds, "Besides, they do a gluten-free crust."

Ronan doesn't slam the lid on the box down and throw it out the window, but it's close.

He wouldn't have figured his shitty little pizza joint even knew what the hell gluten-free was. They're in the _Valley_. The entire fucking Valley is nothing but gluten and sunburns and traffic lights. The next time he sees Tony there's going to be _words_.

-

Improv was never Ronan's strong suit. At the level that he acts, it isn't encouraged. A-list writers have egos that could rival any Hollywood actor.

Still, he's proud of the love note that he manages to scrawl out on a Tony's Pizza napkin and slide into Parrish's pocket as he's leaving. It sticks out enough that it'll fall out soon, hopefully when he's surrounded by people whose opinion he cares about.

It is some seriously purple fucking prose. And Declan said that he didn't learn anything from those writing classes.

-

Ronan doesn't work a regular schedule. He doesn't make Opal work one, either, but she spends a shit-ton of time in the office because it has internet and is -- despite everything -- nicer than the apartment she lives in with six other assistants and students and we're-artists-really-we're-just-working-at-Starbucks-for- _now_.

So it's close to noon when he gets to the attic of the pizza joint and finds it crammed full of red roses.

"What the fuck."

It turns out dozens of dozens of roses have a strong smell. It also turns out that smell does not mix with spoiling pizza, at all.

"There's a card." Opal points unhelpfully into the mass of petals and thorns that's taken over his desk.

Ronan digs it out, stabs his thumbs three times in the process.

There's a cream colored envelope, a classy card inside, _Happy Anniversary_ embossed on the front in swooping calligraphy, a handwritten inscription inside: _I know it's late but I have three years to make up for_ and an exclamation point that somehow manages to be sarcastic.

Most of the people Ronan knows are left-wing Hollywood nuts. He could find someone with a compost heap. That's where these flowers belong.

Instead he pulls out his pocket knife, cuts off a single stem and trims the thorns off it. He doesn't have a buttonhole, so he cuts a hole into his shirt and sticks the rose in.

"Nice boutineer," Opal tells him. "Don't get anyone pregnant at the prom."

Ronan flips her off and goes to run an errand that he cannot ask an assistant to do, even if that assistant did start it with the sex advice.

-

He drives past the Bradbury building, through the surrounding streets until he finds the nearest coffee shop, pulls off an asshole turn to snag a parking space where he can see the front of the store from his car.

He's prepared for a stake out, but it's only a half an hour until Parrish stops by. Typical Hollywood douchebag: powered by espresso.

Ronan gives him a minute to order his coffee, to possibly get recognized, and then he jogs across the street and catches up to him.

"Hey." Ronan steps too close, into Parrish's personal space, rests a hand on his back -- karma's a bitch. It means that he feels Parrish tense up, though he keeps his face perfectly expressionless. Ronan gets more of a reaction from Cheng's tiny AD, who's picking an enormous frappuccino off the counter and glaring at Ronan over the whipped cream. "I wanted to thank you for the flowers." He holds out the gift bag with his other hand.

Parrish eyes it. He has good instincts, but he can't _turn it down,_ in public, when he's supposed to "love" Ronan's impromptu gestures.

"Message received, then," and he takes the bag. Pries it open, what should have been a tiny, safe amount, but Cheng's AD is craning her neck toward it curiously. Ronan keeps his voice louder than necessary when he mentions, as Parrish's face freezes, "you know, the third anniversary is leather."

Parrish snaps the bag shut again. "How...creative...of you."

Ronan smiles at him _beatifically_. "You inspire me."

Parrish's eyes flick around the room, watchful as ever, never forgetting where he is for a second. He leans in to Ronan's arm and presses a kiss to his cheek. "You're so thoughtful. I only hope that I can pay you back."

Ronan leaves the Starbucks with a genuine grin on his face. He always had loved playing with fire.

-

A messenger swings by the pizza shop with two tickets to the ballet.

Ronan has to stop and admire it. He could _not go,_ but then Parrish would say _you don't care about our marriage, why don't we get divorced,_ like _Ronan_ is the cold heartless one.

So he puts on a tux and sits in a theater bored out of his mind while Parrish smirks at him every time he yawns.

It does, at least, give him plenty of time to think of his next move.

-

He finds out from Cheng when they wrap filming for the day and waits for Parrish outside the set. He doesn't want to risk pushing the schedule back and making them late, and he doesn't feel like getting murdered by Cheng's AD.

Besides, it's so much cooler to pull up to the curb in a top-down convertible just as Parrish steps outside.

There's a few crew members hanging around in earshot, so all Parrish says is, "Ronan," a greeting and a question and a protest all at once.

"I thought it was my turn to plan date night," Ronan says, innocently.

Parrish doesn't react to that right away. It occurs to Ronan that he's probably exhausted from working all day, probably wants nothing more than to go home and lie down. Ronan's even better at sabotage than he knew.

"How thoughtful." He tries the passenger door; it's locked.

Ronan makes no move to unlock the door.

Parrish runs a hand through his hair. Another one of those gestures that a director asks for to show off your character's _anguish,_ not something that people really do. Parrish makes it look natural and charming and _pissed off,_ and then he puts his hands on the side of the car and hops into it.

"I love when you're spontaneous," Ronan says to annoy him.

"What can I say," Parrish says, in a monotone, "you bring it out in me."

Spontaneous side or no, Ronan figures there's a good chance that Parrish is going to take one look at their destination and storm off.

He doesn't, but he glares at the building for a long hard minute like he's thinking about it.

"If you don't have the time for me, I understand," Ronan says, sickly sweet voice, and Parrish transfers the glare to him.

"I _always_ have time for you," he says, and hops back out of the car, even though the door unlocked when Ronan turned the engine off. Ronan thinks he just wanted to leave shoe prints on the upholstery.

Parrish drops the glare as they enter the arena -- too public -- but doesn't conjure up anything approaching excitement, either. Ronan keeps his own face neutral, compromise between satisfaction at pissing off Parrish and his own distaste for attending a _professional wrestling match._

Marriage requires sacrifices, after all.

At least they have good seats. Or, he thinks they're good. He told Opal to get the most expensive tickets she could find, but that might have encouraged her to get the worst ones. Maybe being close to the ring is bad. Maybe they're in the splash zone. Although, if they do get splashed with blood or sweat or loose teeth, that would serve Parrish right for making Ronan go to a ballet.

"What an interesting choice," Parrish says as they take their seats. They're late after all, and the match has started. Ronan feels zero sorrow at missing the beginning of the match.

The crowd around them cheers at -- something -- and Ronan has to lean close to Parrish to keep talking. "You loved the ballet so much. I thought you'd like this."

"I am _fascinated_ to hear how you connect those two things."

"Ballet is a celebration of physical excellence. So is wrestling."

"This," Parrish looks pointedly at the ring, where someone in yellow spandex is yelling at someone in blue spandex, "is not excellence. It's a travesty."

Ronan can't go around admitting that Parrish is right. "Don't be a snob. Wrestling can be an art form, too."

"Yeah, the heel just botched a basic sleeper hold," Parrish says in disgust. "This is not art."

Ronan _knows_ that Parrish isn't looking at him, but something gives away his confusion, because Parrish turns back to him. "You grew up in Bel-Air. Have you ever seen a wrestling match before?"

"I didn't grow up in Bel-Air." Parrish makes a face, like he's going to accuse Ronan of lying. "I grew up in Pacific Palisades."

"Uh-huh," he says, unimpressed by that distinction. "I grew up in rural Virginia. You can't _scare_ me with macho culture."

"No." Ronan will fight dirty when he has to. "Just with commitment."

Parrish breathes in, sharp, and as Ronan congratulates himself on landing a blow, Parrish takes his hand and forces out the words, "Not at all."

"Wow," Ronan says. "You know, I thought you were a pretty good actor, but the hacks on my tv show could do better than that."

"You're on HBO and they couldn't find decent actors?" No surprise that Parrish knows what Ronan is filming. He must read the trades, and he's clearly been asking around about Ronan on top of that. "Or did they blow their whole budget on you?"

"There's only five good actors in Hollywood."

"And I made the cut? I'm touched."

Parrish looks way too pleased, and there's people watching them from a few rows away, so Ronan lifts their joined hands up to his face and brushes his lips over Parrish's knuckles.

Parrish turns back to the ring, for all the world like he's watching the match. Ronan isn't fooled. He's gone away somewhere inside his head, and there's every chance that whatever he comes up with while he's in there is going to be bad news for Ronan. Ronan is looking forward to it.

-

At the moment, Ronan's shooting schedule is light. He's on an ensemble show and his character isn't in every episode, though he's in enough of them that marketing is going to paint him as the main character, since he's the biggest name in the cast.

He's not crazy about being the _lead,_ but the part he really hates is that the actors he has the most scenes with are all insufferable, shallow in that way only people who think they're deep can be. He gets through filming by reminding himself this is an anthology and once the season is over he doesn't ever have to come back. He'll be free to go do a movie, where he'll hate most of the cast.

Sometimes Ronan's doesn't know why he does this job.

But then he remembers his father saying _the show must go on,_ remembers sitting on his mother's lap in a borrowed director's chair, watching his father do take after take and nailing it every time, and he sighs and goes to set.

At least, for all that this show is stupid and full of stupid people and in serious danger of damaging his reputation as a stupid actor who does stupid movies, it is on HBO, which is pretty much the only gig in town where Ronan gets to play gay characters _and_ fight people. Today is more gay than fighting; he's filming a love scene, and he's stripped down and oiled up accordingly.

So, naturally, Parrish shows up on set.

"Sorry," he says, smiling brightly and the least apologetic person that Ronan has ever seen. "I hope I'm not interrupting," and by some kind of _sorcery_ he's managed to show up during a union-mandated break.

"Adam." Ronan hopes the name doesn't sound as weird to everyone else as it feels on his tongue. "What are you doing here?"

"You forgot your cell phone last night." Parrish puts an emphasis on _last night,_ like there's anything salacious about a married couple spending the night together. From the way some of the crew members elbow each other, there is. "And I want to meet your costars, since you always have so many great things to say about them."

"Really?" Tad Carruthers -- a human being about whom the best thing Ronan can say is _at least I don't have to pretend to fuck him_ \-- pipes up, which isn't a thing Ronan needs. No one ever needs Tad Carruthers to say words. "I could've sworn you hated us, Lynch."

Parrish grins, for all the world like he means it. Given that he's ruining Ronan's work life, he probably does. "You didn't fall for that, did you? Ronan's a sweetheart. He just acts tough so people won't figure it out."

Ronan closes the distance between them. Reaches past the phone for Parrish's wrist and closes his hand around it. "You didn't have to come out all this way."

"It was no trouble," Parrish say, gleeful. " _Really._ "

"Well." Ronan takes a step closer. "Since you're here," and he drags the two of them off toward his dressing room, Parrish fighting not to laugh the entire time. He thinks one of the catering staff takes a picture.

"They seem nice," Parrish says, as soon as Ronan has shut the door behind them.

"They're not and you know it." Ronan drops his hand like it burns. "Now they're going to think I like them."

"You could express affection for people when you do feel it," Parrish says. "Then it would be clearer that your disdain is genuine."

"Maybe I don't feel affection for anyone."

"Mm-hmm." He isn't convinced. "What about your brothers?"

"What _about_ them?"

"Just curious." He shrugs. "They're my family too, now, right? And I've never even met them."

Ronan takes a step closer to him. He hadn't backed off after dropping Parrish's hand, so it doesn't leave him a lot of room. "Leave my brothers out of this."

Parrish yawns. "Yeah, I'm very intimidated by the guy who's about to shoot softcore porn."

"You moved here from Hicksville, USA, don't pretend you didn't do porn before you got successful."

"I didn't."

"Uh-huh, sure. What was your porn name?"

"I don't have one."

"You might as well tell me, you know I'm going to Google it." Parrish doesn't need to know what an empty threat that is. "Was it your childhood pet plus your hometown?" That's information he could find, or at least, make Opal find for him.

"I didn't have any pets growing up."

"Whatever, your first pet."

Parrish squares his shoulders. "This is childish."

"What, porn is childish?" Ronan asks, and then it clicks for him: "Wait, have you never had a pet?"

He _twitches,_ all over, a reaction that Ronan wants to see again. "I travel a lot," and before Ronan can follow up on that he's shoving the phone into his face. "Here, take your phone back."

Ronan can be magnanimous. Theoretically. "What did you do, steal this?"

"You left it on your chair after _the modern-art ballet_." His voice is pure acid. "What if someone had stolen it?"

"Then I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore, sounds great to me."

"Someone could have gotten into your contacts," Parrish points out. "They could get your brothers' phone numbers and harass them, how would you feel about that?"

There's a knock on the door before Ronan can answer, and the AD pops his head in. "We need to start shooting or we're going to lose the light," he says, deferential, and how is _that_ fair -- when Parrish throws off a schedule the AD apologizes to _him,_ but when Ronan does it, it's time for the guillotine?

And it only gets worse, because the AD adds, "Adam, you're welcome to sit in the director's village."

Parrish's face lights up like the Fourth of July and Christmas and a hundred orgasms at once, "I'd _love_ too," so now Ronan has to film a sex scene while his husband watches and tells everyone that he's a _sweetheart_. Fan-fucking-tastic.

-

"I have a job for you."

"That's not what I'm here for." Apparently what Opal _is_ here for is to construct a building using only stale slices of pizza.

"You work for me."

Opal just places another slice on its side, bolstering the rear defenses of Fort Pizza. Ronan should have figured that wouldn't be convincing.

"I need to know what's the most pain-in-the-ass dog to own."

Opal straightens up, immediately interested.

-

Hollywood "reporting" being what it is, Ronan sees a photograph of Parrish walking the Dalmatian before he runs into him in person.

Ronan has a meeting with a prospective new agent at Jerry's Deli. In a miraculous corporate-rivalry ceasefire, agents at both WME and CAA have spread the word that Ronan's house is haunted, and now no one will take meetings with him there. He lets them believe it. Explaining _there aren't any ghosts but there might be a loose snake_ isn't much of a solution.

He's leaving the restaurant when he spots Parrish at a table with a few people he could probably place if he saw them twenty feet tall on a screen. His instincts fail him -- go over to the table? duck out before he sees you? -- and then Parrish spots him.

He's expecting Parrish to be mad at him. Or, he's hoping Parrish will be mad at him. He's _expecting_ more fake affection.

Instead, Parrish makes excuses to the people he's with and drags Ronan out the back of the restaurant.

"How did you find out about my hearing loss?"

Ronan stares. "Your what?"

"I want to know who told you," Parrish continues. "It's not common knowledge and I'd like to keep it that way."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Parrish frowns at him. "I'm deaf in my left ear."

He blinks. Says, slowly, "I didn't know that."

Parrish looks as confused as Ronan feels. "You gave me a deaf dog, Lynch."

"Fuck." Unease grips him, asks him questions he can't answer. Would he not have gone through with it, if he'd known? Or would that have been what gave him the idea, _I know what'll piss Parrish off --_ "The dog was deaf?"

"I thought that was the point."

"I just told my assistant to find the most pain in the ass dog she could."

Parrish breathes. "Well, she nailed it." No kidding; Ronan needs to be more careful how he channels Opal's gift for chaos. Truly, she's a force to fear and respect. "Phouka has already tried to bite three people, and I had to find a trainer who specializes in non-verbal commands."

"You gave the dog a name?"

"Of course." Parrish frowns again, but not annoyance, more of a _what kind of idiot is Lynch, anyway_ look. "Even I know that pets are supposed to have names."

Ronan doesn't explain that he meant _you gave the dog an Irish folklore name_. Parrish seems like the kind to go for inspiring historical figures or important literary characters.

"So that was your porn name?" he asks, instead. "If I Google it am I going to find your first attempts at acting?"

"I never did porn," Parrish says in the world-weary tone of a man who knows he's going to have to make that protest over and over again. "I named him that because he's a troublemaker, like the person who gave him to me."

Ronan grins. He is getting to Parrish. He is winning this marriage. He is --

\-- married. Right. Fuck.

He only falters for a second, and he's a better actor than most people give him credit for. His face doesn't give anything away.

But Parrish has an uncanny ability to sense weakness.

"You know," and that fake-innocent tone is a thousand times more terrifying than any stock action villain Ronan has ever acted opposite. "Phouka should get to know his other dad. I'll have him sent over to your place." He steps back toward the restaurant and then says, like it's just occurred to him, "fair warning, he's not house trained."

-

Parrish's dog-nanny drops Phouka off at the pizza shop. Ronan pawns him off on Opal, since he's her fault.

"Take the dog to my place and don't let him...eat...things."

Opal looks deeply apprehensive. Phouka is sniffing her, which given that they're directly above a cesspool of grease and spiced meat tells Ronan that the dog is either in love with his assistant or else _an idiot_ on top of everything else. "You want him at your place?"

"If he doesn't pee on my carpet then Parrish wins."

"You're even weirder than you used to be," Opal tells him. "And I say this as the person who released snakes into your house."

Ronan stops. "Snakes, plural?"

She shrugs.

"How many snakes are in my house?"

"More than one," Opal says. "Less than twenty."

"Christ."

"They kill vermin," she insists.

"If they kill Parrish's stupid deaf dog then I'm going to kill _them_. Got it?"

"What if _he_ kills my snakes?" Opal demands, indignant. "What happens then?"

"Nothing. Don't do anything bad to that dog, okay? In fact -- give him a bath."

"I don't want to."

"You should have thought of that before you infested my house with snakes," Ronan says, and slams the office door in her face.

She yells through it, "I'm gonna tell TMZ that you cry when you watch Frozen!"

-

Ronan counts visitation with the dog, and the four new stains in his carpet, as Parrish's latest onslaught of marital terror. Which makes the next move Ronan's.

So it figures that Parrish disappears clean out of Hollywood. Ronan can't find him at Jerry's Deli, at his agent's office, at the dog park, on set. He spends an entire _half-hour_ making small talk with an increasingly smug Cheng before he works it out of him that Parrish wrapped filming three days ago and he hasn't seen him since.

And then, just as Ronan's frustration hits a record high, Opal comes through with a level of dedication and drive that Ronan hadn't previously realized anyone could be capable of.

"I don't have to..." Ronan trails off. He's been an actor since he was five; he doesn't know what people with jobs do. "Promote you or something, do I?"

"Never make me take the dog again," Opal says.

"Did he bite you?" Phouka certainly hadn't taken to Ronan, but then, the feeling had been mutual.

"He _licked_ me. On my _hand_. And then he wagged his tail at me." She shudders. "It was horrible."

So she's the one who finds out, from someone who works for someone who's sleeping with someone who's writing a screenplay with someone who does yoga with Parrish's assistant -- Christ, Ronan hates Hollywood -- that Parrish flew out of town immediately after he finished on Cheng's movie.

Ronan says, "huh."

" _So,_ " Opal continues, like this isn't already more assistance than she has offered Ronan in her entire employment. "I asked Parrish's assistant out to happy hour. I had to promise her a shirtless photo of you," and seriously, Ronan doesn't understand straight girls at all. "Also I put the margaritas on your tab."

"Why?"

"I'm not going to spend my _own_ money on booze slurpees."

He scowls at her, because she knows that's not what he meant.

She scowls back but looks away first, conceding. "I want to help you find Parrish. 'Cause you're losing so much that it's actually stopped being funny."

"I'm not losing."

"You are," Opal assures him. "Also, I'm never dog-sitting for you again."

"We'll see."

"EVER."

"Jesus, fine, okay, no dog. Now what did she tell you?"

"Parrish is in Palm Springs. I got you a flight and booked you at the same hotel he's staying at."

Shit, his assistant _booked him a flight and a hotel_. Either dog-sitting was the worst thing that ever happened to her or he's hit a new record for patheticness.

"When were you planning on mentioning that?"

"Two hours before your flight leaves, so, twenty minutes ago." Opal hands him a boarding pass. "Have fun in Palm Springs. Stop being a loser."

-

Opal hadn't provided any information on what Parrish is doing in Palm Springs, but it's _Palm Springs_ ; he's either on vacation or attending some insufferable industry event. Ronan's plan to disrupt both of those is the same: show up and be himself.

He arrives at the hotel late, but his sleep schedule's been fucked since his first pre-dawn call time when he was six. He wakes up early and goes to hang out in the hotel lobby, so he can catch Parrish before he leaves for the day.

Sometimes people wonder how Ronan can go anywhere without getting attention. Opal had told him, when he first hired her, that he was an idiot to keep his office above a well-trafficked restaurant. But she didn't understand that it's easy, that he just has to act like he isn't a world-famous actor, and that for every person who spots him and takes a picture, a hundred others walk by without a second glance. No one expects to see a movie star when they're stumbling hungover to complimentary breakfast or starting the next leg of their road trip; if you don't think of yourself as a celebrity, people passing by don't, either.

Parrish spot him as soon as he steps out of the lobby.

Ronan waves, with just his fingers: _toodi-loo_.

Parrish turns for the entrance and stalks out, but Ronan and his long legs catch up easily.

"You shouldn't be here," Parrish says.

"Why, are you cheating on me?"

"That isn't possible."

"I heard you went on vacation, I thought you'd miss me." When that fails to get a reaction, Ronan adds, "I missed _you_."

"I'm not on vacation."

"Filming? Do you think there's a part for me? We could do another movie together," Ronan continues, when that fails to get a reaction. "Take us back to our beginnings."

"I'm not filming."

"You're not here for work, you're not here for pleasure. What are you doing?"

A car pulls up to the curb.

"Leaving." Parrish opens the back door and takes a seat.

Ronan climbs in after him. Parrish has already taken the nearest spot, so Ronan sits in his lap.

"Uh -- " the driver looks at them in the rear view mirror, and then turns around to glance over his shoulder, as though to check if Ronan is real or an illusion. "Adam -- "

"Just drive, please," Parrish says, perfectly professional. The driver barely looks old enough to have a license -- he's got one of those three-hair beards that teenagers grow to prove they can -- and the car they're in is a shitty Camry. Ronan's about to mock Parrish for using the crappiest car service in history, but Parrish reaches to push Ronan off his lap, and for a split second Ronan sees his hand is _shaking_.

They drive in silence. He can pretend otherwise, but Parrish is rattled. There's no need for Ronan to say anything else, if he's already upset him.

He tries to guess where they're heading, instead. Not vacation, not filming; it's got to be something that Parrish will enjoy but thinks he shouldn't, or should enjoy but won't. Probably the latter. Probably he has plans to golf with tiresome old producers and pretend to find their company bearable. Well, now he can pretend to be annoyed and scandalized when Ronan makes it very clear to them that their company is _not_ bearable.

He's satisfied with this prediction until they pull up at a campsite, complete with cabins, campfire, picnic benches, and a _crap-ton of children_.

Ronan shoots a look at Parrish, but he just unbuckles his seat belt and steps out of the car. Ronan scrambles after him.

Parrish heads for a table where the only adults in sight are drinking coffee with a handful of teenagers.

"Everything go okay last night?" Parrish slides into the last open seat at the table like it was left for him.

"Some kids whispering after lights out," one of the adults says, handing him a cup of coffee. "A case of homesickness. Nothing serious."

Parrish nods and sips his coffee. "Ronan's going to join us for today," he drops in, casually, without so much as looking at Ronan. The knuckles on the hand gripping the coffee mug are white. "Can he shadow your unit?"

The woman nods. "Fox was about to go set up for archery, she could use another pair of arms."

One of the teenagers identifies herself as Fox by going ten shades paler and wobbling as she jumps to her feet. Great, a fan, and just when he was wishing he was someone other than _Ronan Lynch, movie star_. Say, someone who knew what the fuck was happening.

"Um, it's right this way," the unfortunate Fox says.

Ronan would love to tick Parrish off by not playing along with this obvious attempt to get rid of him, but he thinks if he did then this girl would burst into tears. He's not ready to decimate a child in the crossfire.

Parrish doesn't even watch as Ronan walks away.

Fox leads him down a hiking trail into the desert, away from the cabins and their meager shade. Ronan wishes he hadn't dressed with _distracting Parrish_ as his primary goal for the day. Or that he'd at least ditched the leather jacket in the car.

"There's water when we get there," Fox rambles, so Ronan isn't even bearing his cross with stoic grace. "Of course all the kids have water bottles but I think that's a safety thing, like a law, you have to have water everywhere so no one faints. They've always been really strict about that, ever since I was a camper."

If she keeps talking she's going to die of dehydration before they get where they're going, water bottle or no, but he can't think of anything better to say than "You were a camper here too?"

"Yeah, all the CITs -- all the counselors in training were. Obviously not all the campers come back as CITs, because there'd be way too many. Even though the camp was a lot smaller back then 'cause I think it was just Adam paying for everything. We had way fewer counselors and only one camp shrink -- uh." Her face goes pale again. "I'm not supposed to call them that."

She looks genuinely worried, so Ronan tells her, "I'm not a snitch," and she laughs once, too loud.

"But, um, yeah." She turns forward again and starts walking faster. If it were Parrish, Ronan would assume that was revenge for showing up uninvited, but he's doubts Fox is _trying_ to kill him. Although if she did, Parrish would probably reward her for it. "I've been coming here for years, I love it. It's the one thing you could do every year and be like a normal kid, you know? Because normal kids go to camp. And you'd know that when you were here you weren't the weird one, because everyone else was going through the same stuff you were, too."

Ronan blinks. "Normal kids?"

"Oh, geez, I'm not supposed to say that either," Fox frets. "'Cause we're not supposed to make the kids feel like they're weird for being in foster care. That's the idea, anyway, that's what the -- uh, counselor-type counselors say, but I always felt like -- "

She stops. It's disconcerting after her torrent of words, enough so that Ronan takes a break from working his way through the words _foster care_.

"When you're weird, you know you're weird," he says. "It doesn't matter if someone else won't admit it."

" _Exactly_."

The trail widens out in front of them. There's some trees and an open-air shelter to give a little shade, and a busted ass shed. The part of Ronan that gets jealous of film crews itches to fix it up. Though he gets plenty of physical labor in just wrestling the rusted shed door open and dragging out the archery targets.

A group of kids show up just as they've finished, along with a counselor and another teenager, who makes a beeline for Fox and starts obviously gossiping about Ronan.

He spends the bulk of the morning making sure no extra careless child runs into anyone's line of fire, not that any of the kids are drawing enough weight to do any damage. The various counselors that cycle in and out with their groups of kids -- never Parrish -- discourage chatting on the range. Still, whenever the kids stop for a water break, or take advantage of a distracted adult, Ronan hears them calling each other ridiculous names.

Well, okay, he works in Hollywood, he figures at first that people are naming their kids _Artemis_ and _Pirate_ and _Tiger Eye_. But by the time he hears a kid call another kid _Pigeon_ without anyone getting punched over it, he figures something's going on.

"Oh, it's camp names," Fox explains during a break between campers. "The kids all pick a nickname they want to get called. The counselors know everyone's full name, of course, and some of the kids don't want a nickname, but a lot of them get into it. The counselor-type-counselors say it's an identify affirmation thing, you know, you get to have power over your own life. Also it's fun."

Ronan tries for pleasant small talk. Fox did basically save his life by giving him a water bottle, after all. "So Fox is your real name or -- "

She turns that kill-me-now pale again.

A thought clicks into place.

"You didn't pick your name based off my dumbass movie about _car thieves_."

"It's not that dumb!" she protests, and then takes a swig of water, though it's plain from her face that she'd rather crawl into the desert for forty days. "I was in a really religious foster home when the first Jackson Fox movie came out," she says, a touch more composed. "The family had a bunch of foster kids, because they were trying to save us for Jesus, and when your movie came out they were mean about you, because, you know. You're."

She can't find the words, so Ronan finishes it for her. "Going to hell."

"Gay," Fox says. "We weren't allowed to watch any movies or tv shows or listen to any music that normal kids listened to, but they made a big deal about that movie in particular. And a couple of the kids in the house _were_ gay, you could tell, because whenever the topic came up they would -- shut down. I _hated_ that house," she bursts out, unexpectedly intense. "So when my school friends snuck in to see your movie, I snuck in too, and then I went home and I stole the family's car."

Ronan wonders if a morning's dehydration is enough to cause auditory hallucinations. "What?"

"It was so dumb." Fox raises a hand, a self-conscious flutter, and her eyes are fixed firmly on the horizon. "I was ten, I didn't know how to drive, I made it half a mile. But my case worker decided the placement wasn't working, because duh, and I got put in short-term care and then a much better home, and then I got sent here for the summer. And that was -- you know, the first time I stood up for myself. Like one of those identity affirmation things. You inspired me," and she drops her eyes down to her hands, gripping each other tight in her lap. "I know that's dumb, but Jackson Fox is really important to me."

Ronan doesn't buy Cheng's bullshit that you can save the world by having more gay people and Asians in movies, he _doesn't._ But he can't honestly be mad that his movie made an ten-year-old steal a car and get away from Bible-thumping child hoarders. He thinks even Declan would be proud of him for that.

He tells her, "You're way more of a badass than Jackson Fox."

She breathes out a sharp gust of air. "I have been freaking out all day that you were going to be mad at me, oh my _god,_ I never would have picked this name if I knew I was going to meet you. I mean, I didn't know that Adam was -- you know. Married to you."

Under the circumstances, Ronan wouldn't have said _he didn't know, either,_ so that's not the problem.

The problem is that he doesn't think it until after he's already thought _that's Adam for you, keeping secrets_.

The last group of campers wraps up at archery just before lunch, so he and Fox shove all the shit back into the shed and go eat. It is, he is proudly informed, the turn of the youngest kids to make food, which means lunch is sandwiches and carrot sticks. Ronan makes one attempt to sit near Parrish, but Parrish eels away at the last second, leaves him sitting thwarted at a table of wide-eyed CITs. Ronan stays put; he's not going to chase Parrish around a bunch of picnic table like a love-sick high schooler. He never went to high school. He's not gong to start that shit now.

Fox's designated adult puts him to work after lunch helping kids with arts and crafts. The kids are mostly too young to give a shit about Ronan, so they're not too awed to ask him for help gluing popsicle sticks and braiding lanyards and stringing beads together. What fucking good is fame if it can't save him from arts and crafts?

Ronan sticks it out. _Cool camp counselor_ isn't the hardest role in the world, and he'd take any one of these kids over Tad fucking Carruthers.

Besides, the arts and crafts tables are in the middle of camp, with a perfect view of Parrish flitting around, talking to counselors, helping kids, at one point up on one of the cabins doing something with tools. That would be the perfect opportunity to corner him where he couldn't get away, climb up to the roof and kick the ladder down behind him, except one of Ronan's kids picks that moment to go running off with three pairs of scissors, yelling like a banshee. He has to put a stop to that shit before Parrish can use "reckless endangerment of several dozen minors" as an excuse to get divorced or possibly file charges.

He finally manages to get Parrish in one place, alone, but he has to follow him into a cabin and shut the door behind him to do it.

"You could have said this was where you were going."

Parrish was facing the opposite wall when Ronan entered. He doesn't turn around now. "And you'd have left me alone?"

"I would have liked to know before I was surrounded by children."

"Sorry you're bored."

"I'm not bored. But I want to know that you go running off into the desert to play Santa Claus for a bunch of sad kids -- "

Parrish whirls around, furious. "That, right there, that's why you're not supposed to know. You'd only make it crass. I'm not doing this for attention."

That hurts. That Parrish can look at Ronan and see all the things that everyone else misses, that he's a good actor and he's smart and he's devoted to his family, that he can see all of that and not trust Ronan to do the same for him.

"Right," Ronan says, every inch of hurt paid back in spite. "You don't want anyone to know about your sexuality or your deafness or your charity work. Christ, I wonder why the hell someone so closed off and terrified can't manage to win an Oscar or get married for _real_."

In a movie, Parrish would punch him in the face.

In a real marriage, Parrish would have his own ammunition to fire back.

But Ronan isn't Parrish's co-star. He's not his husband. He's just some asshole who's wasting his time, and Parrish responds to that exactly how he deserves: he steps around him and out of the cabin, slamming the door behind him.

Ronan tries to give it a few minutes before he leaves the cabin. He can't tell if he succeeds or not. His heart is racing too fast for him to track time, his whole body desperate to find something to shove his adrenaline at and coming up short.

He already knows, when he steps out into the blinking bright sun, that Parrish won't be anywhere in sight.

It doesn't stop him looking.

One of the baby-faced CITs is getting sent on an errand back into town, and Ronan uses his star power to get a ride and get the hell away from here.

-

Ronan doesn't tell Opal he's back in Los Angeles, and if anyone would say it's cowardly to hide from your own assistant that just tells Ronan they haven't met his assistant.

Besides, he's hiding from her in a den of snakes, so shut the fuck up, hypothetical critic.

It takes him longer to Google Parrish's camp on his own than it would take Opal, but he's a real person, he's not one of these pathetic Hollywood types that needs their assistant's help to take a shit, so he finds it eventually. It's what he knew it would be, a summer camp for foster kids, except that it's part of a whole network of charities that work with kids in the system, each with their own website, to make Ronan's life that extra bit annoying. The charities have a bunch of overlapping founders and directors and donors on record.

The name _Adam Parrish_ isn't anywhere. Because people thinking you're a decent guy, people not thinking the worst of you, people not assuming you're as desperate and sleazy as they are, that would be _crass_.

Parrish shows up at his house four days later, empty-handed.

He steps away from the door, leaving it up to Parrish whether he enters or stays in the doorway.

Parrish steps through the threshold and stops, like that's as far as he can go.

Ronan shuts the door. "You're back."

"I can't ever get away for more than a week or two."

"Maybe you could if people knew where you were going."

Parrish doesn't repeat his defense from the other day. Maybe he doesn't think Ronan is capable of understanding. Maybe he realizes that understanding and accepting aren't the same thing. "I'm more valuable to them when I'm here making money."

"Who gives a shit if you're _valuable?_ "

"I do. I want to help. That's the point."

Rage is already hammering at the inside of Ronan's skull. "You know what people do when they want to help foster kids? _They adopt them,_ they don't secretly start multi-level nonprofits." 

Parrish breathes in slowly, like he's madder than he meant to get and is trying to stave it off. "You're upset because I volunteer with kids, but you're _also_ upset because I haven't adopted any? What am I supposed to do that doesn't piss you off?"

There's no answer that Ronan can give to that. "Nothing," he mutters, anger dropping away from him as fast as it had picked him up. "Forget it."

"No," Parrish insists. "Tell me what you're thinking. You weren't shy about it last week."

He wasn't, but last week he wanted to argue. He doesn't want to argue anymore. Even if arguing is the entirety of their relationship. Even if that leaves them with nothing, and Ronan feels the hollowness as his heart hits against that fact. "Don't listen to anything I say, I'm full of shit."

Parrish snorts. "No you're not. I am closed off and terrified. The whole reason I got into acting is that I'm better at playing a role than being a person. Hell, given half an excuse I started playing the role of your husband."

He had, and Ronan had dared him to, so Ronan had no one else to blame when Parrish turned out to be as good at that as he was at every other role.

"You don't have to play that part anymore." He takes a half-step away to the end table, grabs the paperwork that's been sitting under his wallet for the last four days, where he couldn't forget it the next time he left the house. Where it's been keeping him from leaving the house so he doesn't have to acknowledge it. "It's the version your lawyer sent me," he says, and Parrish's whole face goes blank. He knows what it is, but Ronan can't stop talking, explaining, making up excuses to keep him around that much longer. "You can check it over. I didn't change anything."

Parrish takes the papers from him and then shuts his eyes, for one single second, going away.

He opens his eyes and flips through the papers, not really reading anything. The first time he hits a signature line he pauses, and then walks slowly across the room until he can lay the papers out flat on Ronan's kitchen table and sign every last line, one brutal flourish of ink after another.

When he gets to the last page he stands up straight again.

"I guess we're divorced," Parrish says.

Ronan nods once, in time with the dull thud of his heart.

Parrish waits for something more, but Ronan has already poured himself out to offer this surrender. What else is there to give?

He should have known Parrish would be a bad winner.

"I'll just," Parrish starts, at the same time that Ronan says, "You can -- "

They both fall silent.

Parrish shuts his eyes again.

"Screw it," and he grabs Ronan's face with both hands and kisses him.

Ronan wraps his arms around Parrish's waist and pulls him close. If this is the only time he gets to kiss Adam Parrish, he's going to make it last. He reels him in, and Parrish sighs and relaxes into him. He makes no move to pull away. On the contrary, his hands slide down Ronan's sides, up his back, exploring, memorizing, hungry.

Ronan drags Parrish toward the bedroom. His husband is pretty smart; if _screw it_ is good enough for him, it's good enough for Ronan.

-

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"Fuck."

"Yeah," and at least Parrish sounds as winded and shocked-stupid as Ronan does.

Ronan turns his head to look at Parrish lying on the bed next to him. He's glowing with satisfaction, naked except for _one sock,_ how did that happen, and if Ronan keeps looking at him he's going to kiss him again.

He looks back up at the ceiling and rubs a hand over his eyes. "We have to be the first idiots in the world to consummate a marriage after it's over."

Parrish shrugs. Their shoulders are touching, and Ronan feels the gesture move through him. "Technically it's not over until we file the paperwork."

Ronan drops his hand down from his face back to the bed. It slots perfectly into the palm of Parrish's hand.

"You know," Ronan says. "We don't have to file it."

He doesn't react immediately, lies perfectly still. But his voice, when he speaks, isn't a controlled level; it's plain confusion. "You want to get married?"

"We're already married," Ronan says. "Why call it off when we're enjoying ourselves?"

"You just want to get laid again," Parrish says, accusatory and fond.

"No." Ronan doesn't need to see Parrish's expression to feel can feel the pointed doubt in it. "Not _just_." He looks down to their entwined hands. Turns his hand over so he can run a finger, feather light, in a circle over Parrish's palm. "I hated finding out there was shit about you I didn't know."

"You shouldn't have known _anything_ about me," Parrish says. "You weren't supposed to. I didn't want you to. And then I blink and you've figured out enough to scare me."

"Yeah, well, I'm an asshole."

"That's not actually an explanation."

It's always been enough of one for everyone else. "You scared me first," Ronan says. "I thought I knew what was happening. I thought I knew what you were going to do. But then you had this whole fucking other life I didn't know about, and -- " he shrugs. "What did you need me for?"

"My life is not _too full_ for you, which you know damn well."

Ronan doesn't buy that, or at least, he doesn't buy that Parrish's life has to be as empty as he keeps it. He thinks Parrish could be happy if he would ever let himself. But if he thinks Ronan could make him happy, if this is how he wants to be happy, if he even wants to try -- 

"So stay a while," Ronan says. "What's the worst that could happen?"

"Many, many things."

He grins. "Yeah, but they'll all be interesting."

Parrish considers this. Ronan gives him time.

Something clicks into place behind his eyes. Ronan thinks that it's closer to _screw it_ then a rational decision. That's okay. He's not a rational choice.

Parrish leans in to kiss Ronan, deeply, stealing his breath away, and then he swings his legs over and gets out of bed, which is a hell of a mixed message.

Ronan rolls halfway over in bed, keeping in arm's reach as Parrish digs through their discarded clothes. "Where are you going?"

"Kitchen." He pulls his briefs back on, which is an unnecessary bit of modesty just to go to Ronan's kitchen and also a crying shame. "I want to destroy those papers. I don't trust you not to send them to Cheng in your sleep."

"I can't sleep if you keep me busy." Parrish rolls his eyes. Ronan catches his wrist lightly, lifts his hand up to his mouth to kiss his knuckles. "Either the snakes eat them or we can burn them tomorrow, it can wait."

Parrish plays hard to get, but Ronan had him the second he touched his arm; he'd seen the muscles in his stomach tighten, the subtle indentation where he was biting the inside of his lip. "Yeah, okay," and he gives up on hiding his smile. "Tomorrow."

Ronan tugs meaningfully on his arm and Parrish laughs, climbs back into bed, kisses him again as soon as he's close enough. Ronan wraps an arm around him and soaks up the feel of him, his perfect infuriating wonder.

Parrish pulls away abruptly, looking troubled.

"What do you mean, _snakes?_ "

-

_Oscar winner ADAM PARRISH and action star RONAN LYNCH surprised friends and fans yesterday by filing for divorce._

_The two married shortly after meeting on the set of Devotion, but only went public with their relationship two years ago._

_The former-item were photographed yesterday taking their dogs Phouka and Pickaxe to a dog park. It looks like they're keeping the divorce amicable for the "kids."_

_The notoriously private couple has not offered any explanation on social media for their split. When reached for comment Mr. Lynch's publicist responded with the lyrics for the song "Fixer Upper" from Disney's Frozen._

-

"I thought the point of not getting divorced was to save time on paperwork." Adam shuffles through the packet his bemused attorney had sent him. It turns out _how fast can we get divorced and then remarried_ isn't a question lawyers get a lot. Who knew.

Ronan twists his head around until he can see Adam. It takes some doing since he has a Dalmatian on his chest and a bull terrier on his legs, a couch arrangement they'd perfected the first time Adam had an international shoot and Ronan was pretending it was just Phouka who was miserable about it. "The point of not getting divorced was not giving you an excuse to leave."

"You're not afraid I'm going to leave now?"

"No," Ronan says, and when Adam's expressions softens he adds, "because I'd take the dogs and you'd miss them."

Adam scowls. "It would serve you right if I didn't remarry you. Six months. It's going to take six months for the divorce to finalize."

"Whatever. You know you're looking forward to doing a lot of vague and confusing interviews about us."

Adam doesn't deny it, but he does say, "you owe me another dog after this."

"You owe me a kid."

Adam looks down, grinning in that way he has where he's too happy to hide it; the way he'd smiled the first time they talked about fostering, the way he'd smiled when Ronan had admitted he'd rather stay at Adam's place than ever spend another night in the snake house. The way he'd smiled when he'd said that he was a little sad they'd never have a real wedding and Ronan had pointed out that they could, actually, get married again, _if_ \--

"I win," Ronan says, smug.

"Shut up." Adam abandons the paper-strewn table to sit on the floor by the couch, resting his head on Ronan's shoulder, which is pretty much the only inch of him not currently occupied by dog, and which is also a pretty shitty way of arguing that he _isn't_ winning. Ronan twists his head back around and kisses Adam's ear, to drive home the point.

Adam says, "I can't wait to be divorced from you," and it isn't an act at all.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this fic you can [reblog it on tumblr](http://toast-the-unknowing.tumblr.com/post/177934279075/theres-talk-going-round-this-town).


End file.
